Opa
Christmas, 1995—I
was in New York City with my mother to see Rockefeller Center and the Christmas
tree. Somehow we found ourselves outside
of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “It’s so much
like the churches in Germany”, my mother said, “Let’s go in.”
My mother was born
a German, and despite living in America since 1956, she will always be a
German. She suffered most of World War
II in Munich beneath the murderous rain of Allied bombs. And although she kept her German identity,
she lost her faith; it collapsed in the war’s inferno like her Munich’s
Frauenkirche Cathedral. While the
postwar Germans raised the Frauenkirche, hope of my mother’s Catholic
resurrection was dashed by her marriage to my Jewish father, a New York cabbie,
and her disdain for the “modern” ways of the American Catholics.
“When I was a kid
in Germany they said Mass in Latin! It
was something that moved you, it was holy.
Here it’s all in English and the priest makes with jokes, trying to
clown around. Like a party. And the churches here, they all look like
schools and office buildings. There’s
nothing to inspire you, to uplift you.”
But the holy
grandeur of the European cathedrals still pulled at her. And like the numerous cathedrals, chapels,
and monasteries my mother and I visited in our German travels (she took me home
with her six times when I was a child); my mother had to see the great St.
Patrick’s, because it reminded her of home.
Not that I
cared. I was thirty then and tired of my
mother’s German ways, her constant pining for her lost German life. That Germany was gone. As were other things.
“I want to light a
candle for my father,” she said. “He
died around this time of the year, in Siberia.
I want to light a candle and say a prayer for him.”
My mother lost
more than her faith in the war. She lost
her father. She made a small tithing and
lit a candle. And then, to my surprise,
she made the sign of the Cross and whispered a prayer. I silently watched. And I knew she would tell me the story…once
again, the story of her father…my grandfather… my “Opa”.
And I thought, For
God’s sakes, it’s been fifty years now.
Let go of him already.
But she
couldn’t.
“My father was born in 1900, out in the
country, in Bavaria. They were just
farmers. They took his father and sent
him off to the first war, and then they took my father, while he was still a
boy, later on. I have a picture of him,
with all the other boys from his village, drafted into a company in 1917. He was lucky and he came back unhurt. So did his father. They made it through that one.
“He married my mother in the ‘20s. I was their first child, and a few years
later my two brothers came, one after another.
I had an older sister that Mama had when she was young, before she
married. But this half-sister never
liked us kids, and as soon as she was old enough, she took off and we never saw
her again. Not to this day.
“Life was tough in the country. But it was simple and we were happy with work
and school and basic things. Our
teachers, our parents, and the priests expected us to do as we were told, or we
got a beating. They took the stick or
the belt to us. My mother had her wooden
spoon. We had to be tough, and lucky for
us we were. Or we never would have
survived what was coming.
“My father worked hard from sunup to
sunset. But we were still poor. This was the Depression, and it was worse in
Germany than anywhere else. We went
weeks without a scrap of meat. We ate
potatoes and made pancakes from what flour we found. A few vegetables. That’s all.
No matter how hard my father worked, that’s all we had.
“Then Hitler came and soon there were jobs
and money and food. My father moved us
to Munchen so he could take a job in a factory.
He filed steel parts all day, and the metal dust got in his skin, and
worked its way into his eyes, even with goggles, and he began slowly going
blind. I remember he had glasses, but he
still had to struggle to read the newspaper.
First he brought the paper to his nose, and then he pushed it away,
holding it as far from his face as he could.
But it was still blurry.
“We had a flat in a building in the Alt
Trudering neighborhood. We weren’t far
from Dachau. But to us, Dachau meant
nothing. To us it was just a place we
sometimes passed on our bikes or on the Strassenbahn, the streetcar. Anyway, things were better then, but you
know, we were still poor, just not as bad as before.
“My mother was very hard on my father. I guess you could say she was a real
bitch. She complained about everything,
and never gave the poor man any peace.
He was quiet, you see, and she was a ranter. And it drove her crazy when he wouldn’t talk
back to her. She tried always to provoke
him with her complaints and her nagging.
He would sit and listen for hours in silence. Then something would snap and he would get up
and smack her one, knock her to the floor.
That would shut her up…”
That’s where my
mother got it, I thought, her relentless nagging and criticism, from her
mother. But my old man didn’t bear it
silently. He was on his feet at her
first word, right in my mother’s face.
And if he knocked her down a few times, well, she got her licks in, too;
with thrown plates and coffee mugs and once a glass Listerine bottle, the only
weapon with guaranteed antiseptic properties:
lay open and sterilize a scalp in one step. Not that it was unjustified, I suppose. My old man was selfish, lazy, adulterous, and
had a hair-trigger temper. He was an old
New York blue-collar Jew with a big mouth.
First I was afraid of him, then I was embarrassed by him; finally, I
hated him. And in each step of this
evolution to my final break with him, my mother was there, guiding me. He was no good and she made sure I understood
that; she vilified him without letup. By
the time I figured out her game, it was too late to undo her
manipulations. He was dead. There was nothing left for me to do but try
to recollect the brief time when I was little and he loved me, and we, we were
father and son.
“Stupid Americans, they think every German
was a Nazi. They don’t understand that
we were just people, regular, poor people.
We had to join the Hitler Youth and wear the uniforms and march and sing
in the parades. So what? What did we know, especially us kids? It’s just something we had to do, it was
expected of us. So was doing our
schoolwork and going to church. And our
parents, they went to work and struggled to survive.
“Then the war came. I was twelve when it started. My brothers were nine and five. Things were okay the first few years, but
later on, we were hungry again, because they started rationing food.
“My father was drafted into the local
defense force. He was forty, and he had
those bad eyes. But they gave him a
uniform and a rifle anyway, and he had to do duty around the city.
“A few years passed and then the bombing
started. First a little. Then nearly non-stop, until the end of the
war. Night and day. There is no way to describe what it was
like. There is no way you can know what
it was like unless you were there. No
way. The people here, they had it so
easy during the war. They complain about
the rationing; they couldn’t get a steak or gas for their cars to take a trip
to the beach. Ha! They don’t know what suffering is. What a horror war is…”
There was a time,
a few years before, when I was driving my mother home from a holiday visit to
friends. Of course they were German
friends, most of my mother’s friends were.
I was a few years out of college and living with her; I was a mess, I
was lost, and I couldn’t hold a job then.
That was my post-traumatic response to the war in my home and the
Listerine bottles and the torn German-Jewish fabric of my soul. But it was nothing compared to my mother’s
post-traumatic disorder.
It was night and
the sky was thick with clouds. We passed
Dealer’s Row: the avenue leading out of town dotted with one car dealership
after another. And one was attracting
attention to its big weekend sale with a trio of floodlights that played
searching arcs across the belly of the gray cloud cover. Much the same as the searchlights that played
across Munich’s wartime skies, desperate to spot Allied bombers in time. My mother covered her face and turned away.
“I can’t look at
that. Why do they have to do that? They shouldn’t be allowed to do that!”
And I remembered
then, the one time in high school that I played my Black Sabbath album. Specifically, the song “War Pigs”, with its
howling overture of air raid sirens. My
mother, flushed crimson, charged into my room and shrieked, “Turn that shit off
now!” I knew why, and I did.
And I knew then,
like I knew when we saw the floodlights, like I knew outside of St. Patrick’s
in 1995, that no matter what had happened in my home in my childhood, it would
never top my mother’s suffering. And I
know that my mother was making sure I knew that. Maybe not so much out of any sense of
perverse satisfaction, but instead because of her burden of guilt.
“They put my father in an Air Defense
unit. He went at night with the other
old men to the flak towers, where they had the guns, and from high up there
they watched the city burn. They
watched, without being able to do anything, while their neighborhoods were
destroyed.
“We had some close calls. When the sirens went off, we had to run to
the bunker. They would lock them when they
filled, or when the first bombs hit, and sometimes we couldn’t get in. Then you had to find a hole in the ground to
crawl in until it was over. Once I
stayed behind to fix some food to take, because we would be in the bunkers for
hours, starving. I didn’t make it in
time, and I got locked out. I spent the
night on the steps…
“It was me, my mother, and my two little
brothers, alone most nights. We worried
about my father because he was away on duty during the raids, and sometimes he
had to help clean up afterwards, and he didn’t get back for days. When he did, he had nothing to say about what
happened. Not with words. But we read the story in his near-blind eyes.
“He had it the worst. Between his work and his eyes, his duty and
my mother, the poor man had but one pleasure, once a year: his Christmas tree.
“Christmas was always the best time, to me,
holy. There is nothing like the German
Christmases we had as children. It had
nothing to do with presents; we were so poor, all we got for gifts were maybe
an orange, or a pfennig, or a part to fix a broken doll. But it was still wonderful, exciting, and
frightening, too.
“Here they have Santa Claus, but we had the
Christ Kind. He came to our houses and
we had to hide. If we were bad that
year, we would get a lump of coal and a beating afterwards. If we were good, we got a gift. We never saw him, of course, but we heard him
come in while we huddled under our covers.
Of course we never got the beating, but we were always afraid we
would. Then afterwards we would go out
to the midnight Mass. And every year it
snowed before Christmas, and in the day the sun would melt the top of the snow
and at night the wind would howl down from the Alps and freeze it, turning it
into ice. When we walked at night to
Mass and back the snow was crispy, knusperie.
And I loved that sound. I will
never forget that sound.
“And my father, every year he would go out
alone to the forest a few days before Christmas with his pipe and an axe. No one was allowed to go with him. He would be gone all day, and when it came
near dark, my mother would fret and complain.
He would finally return, dragging a tree he cut himself.
“In the afternoon of Christmas Eve my father
would set up the tree. But he didn’t
hurry with it; he didn’t just throw it up in a stand and leave it. No, he took his time and made it
perfect. See, no tree is even. He would prop it and look at it for a long
time. Then he would take his knife and
start trimming the branches.
“He worked on the tree until it was
perfectly balanced. If there were open
patches, he would drill holes in the trunk, then take branches from where the
tree was dense and fit them in the holes, filling the empty spots. He worked like this for hours. Before long my mother would start complaining
because she had a big dinner to cook and whenever she had a lot of work to do
that set her off. But he would ignore
her. He wouldn’t quit until that tree
was perfect. That was his only pleasure
and his only art.
“And when we moved to Munchen, he still got
his tree. We had a bicycle and he would
ride out of town to the woods. He lugged
it home and up the four flights to our apartment.
“The war dragged on, with more bombings and
less and less food. I finished school
and was apprenticed to a baker. The
bakery was across the city. They were
one of the few who had enough food. They
were fat, in fact, but they were stingy feeding me. They made me their slave, cleaning up their
bakery, and I had to share a room in the baker’s house above the bakery, with
the baker’s daughter, because it was too far to travel home. It took too long to cross the bombed city,
and it was too dangerous. So I lived
there during the week. And that baker’s
daughter, she hated me, and I was miserable.
“One weekend I went home, and on Monday I
had to go back. I was late and afraid I
would lose the job or at best, get a beating.
But it never happened.
“When I got back there was no more bakery,
just a hole in the ground. And flour
dust in the air. I stared at the hole
for a few minutes, and then I went home.
I was apprenticed as a salesgirl after that, in a department store,
although by then, there was nothing much to sell.
“Then orders came in for my father, in late
‘44. His flak unit was mobilized into
the Wehrmacht for duty near Berlin. He
had to leave the next day. My mother was
hysterical. My father had to be at the
train station, the Ostbahnhof, at dawn.
My mother was too upset to go with him.
My brothers were afraid. I was
sixteen, then. I went with him.
“We stumbled through the wrecked streets and
there was not much to say. We had to be
careful in the dark; you could fall in a crater and break your bones. Or trip over things.
“We got caught in a raid. It came so fast there was no time to find a
bunker. But we found a crater, and we
took cover there. I don’t think the raid
was long, but it felt that way.
“We made it to the Ostbahnhof in time. He met his unit there; all the old men from
our neighborhood, all in the same unit.
The train came and he got on, and he was gone.
“And I never saw him again.
“We
had a letter from him, once, and that was it.
He had arrived outside Berlin OK.
We were terribly worried. And of
course we had our own troubles.
“The bombings worsened by the week. Christmas came, and of course without my
father, there was no tree. But we were
lucky; we weren’t bombed out, although there were some close calls. 1945 came and we were very hungry. Rations were cut to nothing. We spent a lot of time searching or waiting
for food. Everything fell apart, first
slowly, then quickly. You could feel
that the war was almost over. Order
broke down. Soldiers were on the move,
first one way, and then another. There
was no sense to it. And then we heard
they were rounding up boys to fight.
“My brother Hansi, he was fourteen. We knew they would come for him to make him a
soldier. But enough was enough. My mother hid him in a wrecked barn, and we
snuck him food when we could.
“Then one day the soldiers came. ‘Where is your son, they asked? He has to come with us; he has to defend the
city.’ They were Military Police. They were real bastards, and they didn’t look
like they had done any fighting themselves, ever. My mother was shaking with fury, trying to
hold her tongue. She didn’t say a word,
she just beckoned them.
“She led them to the ruin of an apartment
building down the street.
“‘He’s buried under this with his best
friend. If you can find him, you can
take him!’
“The soldiers left, and didn’t come back.
“Then, just like that, the war was over, and
the Americans came to the city. We hoped
my father would come home, or we’d hear some word from him. But there was nothing…”
My mother didn’t
know his awful fate until 1947, when the sole survivor of the flak unit came
home, and told the story.
“They were up by Berlin for a while. Suddenly they were put on trains and sent
south, to Czechoslovakia, without the flak guns. They gave them some bullets for their old
rifles and some little rockets to fight tanks and put them in the front
line. It was early ‘45.
“They were supposed to fight but there was
no way they could. They were old men,
lame, weak, or nearly blind, like my father.
The Russians came with ten thousand men and a hundred tanks and
surrounded them. There was no hope and
they surrendered, without firing a shot.
Not a shot, dammit!
“But the Russians didn’t care about
that. They packed them in trains and
sent them east. They stopped somewhere
and let them out of the cars, and there were women there, Red Army women. The women laughed at them and beat them, and
then they took their underpants and socks, and their boots, too, if they had
good boots. Then back on the train.
“This time the train kept going, all the way
until it reached Siberia, in the middle of nowhere, near the Arctic
Circle. There was a camp for prisoners,
beside a forest. And they put them to
work.
“They had to cut down all the trees. They worked the prisoners from dawn till dark
with barely any food. Cutting trees by
hand.
“Christmas trees.
“Siberia.
The men had no socks. No
underpants! The women had taken
them! How did they expect them to survive
in the cold, huh? How? Everybody thinks the Germans are monsters;
the Germans were the only murderers in the war.
It’s a lie. What about those Russian
bastards, the way they killed their prisoners or worked them to death? How many millions did Stalin kill, before the
war? How, how did they expect them to
survive in the winter? How…?”
And so my Opa died
there, in Siberia, cutting down Christmas trees. He froze to death and he’s there still, under
the snow, alone, awaiting discovery like a thousand score other Germans, German
mastodons, extinct, frozen over, vanished.
There is no marker on his grave, because he has no grave, no place of
rest, in that infinity of icy nothingness.
If he is ever uncovered, his gray brittle face will serve as wordless
epitaph.
“Time passed and we figured he was dead but
we didn’t know. We were penniless but my mother couldn’t get her war widow’s
pension because we had no proof of his death.
Then, in ’47, that man from the unit came back. He had survived the camp. He told us what happened. And he signed an affidavit attesting to my
father’s death so my mother could get the pension. He signed affidavits for all the widows of
the neighborhood men in that unit…”
By 1995 I was
tired of this story. Now I’m writing it
myself. Why? Why now, when my choice is to identify myself
as a Jew, am I writing this German story?
Maybe it was the
death of my own father in 1998 that changed things. He was an old man, too, a very old man--he
was born in 1910. When I was born he was
already 54. Like my mother’s father, he
suffered—a lonely, impoverished life—and then the awful temper and fierce
tongue of my own mother. And because of
this I shared my mother’s sorrow for a lost father and his tale of doom, along
with some understanding of why, now after 60 years, she still can’t let him go.
For there is a
relevancy here and similarities beyond mere coincidence. My father did not die peaceably. He too was exiled to a Siberia. He fashioned it with his shameful ways, but
my mother and I sent him there, and kept him there, because we didn’t forgive
him. He died there, miserable, sick,
alone. I didn’t see him for the three
years leading up to his death. It was
too much for me. I was afraid of the
feelings that might be overwhelm me seeing him, slowly rotting all that time in
the sad hell of a state-run nursing home, the last stop on his long journey. Before the nursing home, he spent a decade
nearly homeless, shifting between nights in fleabag motels and sleep stolen in
hiding on NJ Transit trains. And when he
was desperate, a homeless shelter.
Now he lays alone
in death, too. I buried him, and never
went back. There is no marker on his
grave. I have never bothered to have one
erected. Like my Opa in Siberia, my
father lies in an unmarked pit.
Perhaps this is what
I learned from the constant telling of my Opa’s story. That fathers are to be sent away to suffer
and never be seen again.
THE
END
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